patti smith

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interview and portraits

by ALEPH MOLINARI

 

Magic has always been part of Patti Smith’s artistic life, especially through her love for words and the power of poetry.

Like a modern medium, her voice and multimedia performances are a gateway to the invisible that must be visible.

 

ALEPH MOLINARI — This is a conversation that we’ve been having in our encounters and collaborations. It’s always been about the magical and invisible worlds that surround us. In my view, you are a kind of medium. You channel characters and bring their voices to life. And that, to me, is an act of magic. How did this process come about?    

PATTI SMITH — It has always been a combination of imagination and belief and having an open mind. As a young child, I believed in elves, spirits, and fairy tales. I didn’t think of them as entertainment. To me, it was a glimpse of their world, and I felt I was good at continuing that world. I could sit for hours in a field reading, and I’d channel them, not by any method I was taught but just by listening and waiting. I learned very early on that you can’t petition anybody.

ALEPH MOLINARI — You just have to be open.

PATTI SMITH — Yes. And I never thought much about it. I used that power mostly to tell stories, entertain other children and my siblings, or entertain my mind at night. The book would end, but I didn’t want it to end, so I would keep it going in my mind and find new adventures. When I started performing, I found out early that I was very good at improvising. It was really when I met Sam Shepard — he was a playwright, and he wanted us to write a play. So, we wrote a poem, a little play, that called for the actors to improvise a poetic argument with each other, like a rap or a rant. This was in 1971, I think. And I said, “How do I know if I’ve made a mistake?” And he said: “It’s like a jazz drummer. If you miss a beat, you just invent another one.” And it was a very simple thing, what he said, but I realized one step is a stepping stone to the next stone. So, I’ve just always applied that to performing.

ALEPH MOLINARI — So, filling in the gaps to create new narratives.

PATTI SMITH — Yeah, exactly. And the possibilities of that narrative. It can go anywhere. It could be the Snake River or the rings of Saturn, but you just keep going. When I befriended William S. Burroughs, he and I were quite close in a different way than with other people. William was really involved in experiments with channeling, which inspired him to write The Third Mind with Brion Gysin. It was one of the things he lived for. He used to come to CBGB to see me perform, before I had drums or anything. It was a lot of poetry, a lot of improvising. And he had a long talk with me about how I would just get on a horse and go off. Burroughs told me that I had shamanistic powers. He’d say: “You have this thing. You can call it whatever you want, but you have it so guard it and nurture it and never doubt it.”

ALEPH MOLINARI — It’s an important moment when someone sees that in you and tells you, “You have this power.” It becomes a responsibility and a path to self-knowledge.

PATTI SMITH — It is. I was never great in school, but I began reading really early in life. I knew where my gifts were, but I would never consider myself academic. I didn’t have a calculably high IQ. I was always a bit clumsy. But I knew I had something. I thought it was imagination. Then I thought, “Well, I’m an artist embracing being an artist.” And artists have a certain mind or a certain way they connect with their creative impulse. And so, they started calling me the “high priestess of rock and roll,” which, for me, was a little embarrassing because I have many vocations and ways that I express myself. I don’t like calling myself a musician because I don’t really play any instruments. I sing, and I have a good musical sense. I know I’m a good performer. But I was married to a musician, so I know true musicians and when that’s their calling, their thoughts, and what they experience. I don’t know what I am. I could never bear to call myself anything like a shaman. I have no trained powers or anything like that. I just try to keep it in a place that has no expectations of recognition.

ALEPH MOLINARI — There’s no vanity in doing it. It’s just a process of channeling outward. How did you start to channel these characters? Like Arthur Rimbaud, for example, who’s an important character for you.

PATTI SMITH — I think it crystallized when I met Stephan Crasneanscki. He goes to the mountains, to the caves of Mexico, to Ethiopia, and he brings back to me his travels and his knowledge, not just through his memory and his mind but also through the sonic landscapes he’s pieced together in his fieldwork. Stephan and I met on an airplane. I don’t like talking to strangers — I like to keep to myself. But he was reading a book of poems by Nico … and you don’t ever see a guy reading Nico’s poems. And since I knew her, I was curious. He told me he wanted to have the poems read to a background of blinding crickets, which is what Nico heard at the end of her life. Where I’m from in South Jersey, we’ve had cricket manifestations and breeding, and the sound is screaming at night. I’ve always loved crickets. People hate them. I mean, they eat up the crops, and they make that sound.

ALEPH MOLINARI — Like a frequency of nature.

PATTI SMITH — Yeah, exactly. Then I asked him, “Who is going to do it?” And he said: “I don’t know. I’ll find somebody.”And I said, “I’ll do it.” I didn’t even know his last name. And when we recorded that, I was able to somehow penetrate Nico. Then, when we performed it live, I felt myself go further. I could feel myself within her on that bicycle on her last ride. I could feel a sense of remorse about her son and her desire for substances. I loved her early songs, but I didn’t know much about her personal life, and a lot was revealed to me through her poems. So, when Stephan was working on Rimbaud, I said, “Well, let me work on that.”

ALEPH MOLINARI — Because Robert Mapplethorpe also did a book about Rimbaud, right?

PATTI SMITH — Well, I introduced Rimbaud to Robert. I was reading Rimbaud when I was a teenager so I had a long relationship that didn’t seem so extraordinary to me. Then when we moved on to Antonin Artaud, who I also loved when I was young, a similar thing happened when performing his poems — I really plunged into his psyche. I understood the whole spectrum of what he was saying and of his blasphemy, which is not personal. It’s just a freedom, a sort of madness that lets him see the worst alongside the beauty in everything. I felt privileged to be privy to another depth of his energy but in a whole different way. When Stephan and I started doing entirely improvised material, that’s when our work really grew, especially in performance. There’s a piece called “Radio Baghdad,” which is a 12-minute improvisation to heavy rock chords of a woman trying to sing her children to sleep as the bombs are falling, and she’s trying to tell them of their heritage. She said, “We invented the zero, and we mean nothing to you.” It goes back to the heritage of mathematics and the spiritual heritage.

ALEPH MOLINARI — The transfer of knowledge. And how do these connections come to you?

PATTI SMITH — It’s all improvised after I study it. And I usually do it at a cost when I channel. Sometimes, I wind up with a really bad two-day migraine because I go so deep. I have channeled Blind Lemon Jefferson, a boy going into Vietnam, an older Black woman who lost her grandson to crack. I don’t know how I find these people. Maybe they find me or some spirit that speaks of them. And when I listen to the soundscapes that Stephan gives me, he’s giving me the Arctic, he’s giving me footsteps on the ice, he’s giving me wolves howling. I’m always seduced by these things.

ALEPH MOLINARI — Through your performances with Soundwalk Collective and Stephan, you create magic by traversing different layers of time and being, and opening up people’s hearts. And that, to me, is the most powerful way of communicating, downloading from the invisible onto the visible.

PATTI SMITH — It really is, and I had never thought about equating love with this. It’s not that I negated it — I just didn’t think about it. But there is an aspect of love that makes these things possible. What we did with Correspondences at BAM was six or seven pieces that are monologues, developed and improvised in the studio, but I was entering into these characters, as you said. I’m entering into the world of each song, from one phase of existence to another. Each time we do it, I have a bit of trepidation because it’s still the “unknown.”

ALEPH MOLINARI — And it’s also a confrontation and a mirror.

PATTI SMITH — Yes, exactly. And it’s also where you have to be open and trust your channeling power. If something seems to be in the distance, then I have to apply a certain amount of experience, almost as an actor.

ALEPH MOLINARI — The embodiment of the other.

PATTI SMITH — Yes. Sometimes you have to take every tool you can to deliver the most authentic performance possible, which might also be, as you said, embodying the person. Embodying — it’s an interesting thing, isn’t it?

ALEPH MOLINARI — Art is a very mystical experience in that way. It connects you to different times and different perspectives of reality.

PATTI SMITH — For sure. I was obsessed with the Ghent Altarpiece for years, and right before the pandemic, they were going to show it one more time before taking it away to be worked on. So, without telling anyone, I booked a ticket to Brussels. They came and got me after the church and the museum were closed, and I got to spend time with the altarpiece for hours in the empty church. I went home, and it was raining, and I was sitting in my little room under the skylight. I shut my eyes and went all the way back to the 16th century. I found myself in Jan van Eyck’s room, and I was watching him from the back painting the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb and the sacrifice, the lamb.
I saw it so clearly — the wood, the patina, what his workroom looked like, the smells, everything. I can’t even say it was lucid dreaming. It was just letting everything go, and going back and back. It’s almost cellular. It just happens like a gift. And I have had many of those in my life. So, where does that come from? Imagination, belief? Is it time travel? People place names on these things, and in placing names, we limit ourselves. Anytime we start applying a lot of rules, regulations, definitions, we’re losing something. It precludes possibilities.

ALEPH MOLINARI — Which I think is the power of magic — to open up that imagination and that possibility of new forms of seeing, of existing, of different dimensions coexisting. It’s about being open. I remember a beautiful story you told me when we were doing the installation at the Pompidou. You told me about the time you took peyote with Robert Mapplethorpe here in New York.

PATTI SMITH — Oh, it felt like going into a hollow mountain and watching a bird fly up to the top of the mountain, and his white head became the peak. I’ve never really known how to interpret that. I just take it as it is.

ALEPH MOLINARI — There’s an architecture of the substance in relation to how it responds to the chemistry of the brain. And there’s a sense of place that’s being transferred, which is what you had. You hadn’t been to the desert in the north of Mexico, but the peyote took you there. There’s a memory of the place and where it comes from, and it opens up that portal to travel. That’s why it’s called a trip.

PATTI SMITH — And see, that’s indefinable. When you talk about travel — time travel or any kind of travel — you can’t break it down chemically and materially. The ether, the materials… And it’s inexplicable how some people are touched in different ways.

ALEPH MOLINARI — When you pick peyote in the desert, you walk through the desert, and it’s so rich in life. It’s a very rich ecosystem, and you have all sorts of shapes and the coexistence of these silhouettes, big and small. It’s so beautiful. And so, you go with the Wixárika tribe, and you set out to find your own peyote. And to find it, you have to decode nature — it’s like a secret code. The peyote has to reveal itself to you. It chooses you. I think that’s a problem of society today — that we’re not tuned into the frequencies of nature and its language.

PATTI SMITH — And we don’t see it, empathize with it, or feel its pain. We don’t feel the pain of other species. We don’t feel because modern man is coupled with science. To me, it’s what we do as human beings in retaliation for something that we think is no longer useful or needed. We’re unified with every aspect of nature. And I think I understood that at a very early age.

ALEPH MOLINARI — In this issue about magic, we want to articulate that now is the time to reconnect with that empathy for nature. Because if we continue on this dark path of materialism, isolation, and lack of community, I don’t know what’s going to be left.

PATTI SMITH — Well, we’re used to things happening somewhere else. But now, with the changes in our climate, we’re seeing tornadoes, floods, catastrophic temperature changes, and terrible fires in our forests, and also disease being perpetuated. America is the newest country, the youngest country pretty much, and the last to wake up while being so assured of ourselves.

ALEPH MOLINARI — It’s going to be a very costly awakening.

PATTI SMITH — Very costly. And if you already feel awake, it’s a strange feeling watching those who are being awakened because they lost their Tesla in a flood. But that’s only the beginning.

ALEPH MOLINARI — I don’t see people thinking of the collective and how we’re going to survive. I see them thinking of how they’re going to entrench themselves further within their self-interest.

PATTI SMITH — Yes, and also find ways to protect their interests, whether economically or politically. And we’re watching it unfold everywhere. It’s actually breathtaking. People don’t even try to hide anymore because they do all this out in the open. I’m normally an optimistic person, and one has to be. You believe in the future, you want to do more work, you want to do good things, and you have to believe in order to keep doing your work. But there’s a part of me that feels an almost Biblical sense of apocalypse, and I just have to take a breath and keep doing whatever I can. I also believe that the power of good should not be underestimated. No matter how naive or idealistic it may seem, spreading and radiating love and living by it is our main armor and our weapon. And the protection of our children and nature — that’s our job. We have to be our own mentors at this point. We have to merge with those who have the tools and are great environmentalists or great journalists or great herbalists or great mystics. We have to merge with them, but we can’t seek teachers. People don’t respond to preaching. And we just have to radiate the energy of knowledge and hope that people will absorb it in some way — another aspect of magic.

ALEPH MOLINARI — And were there mentors who were instrumental in opening up these realms of communion and connection to you? How do you find them?

PATTI SMITH — They come by air, they come from the desert. But they come. I personally don’t do well with teachers. I don’t like to be analyzed. It’s about finding your kin. And when I find kin, it’s something mercurial. When I first came to New York and started taking my work out into the world, perhaps I lacked confidence or full knowledge of myself. And it was a little hard at first to negotiate being in New York because, in some ways, people saw me as a kind of hick, like, “She talks like a truck driver, but she’s talking about Rimbaud.” [Laughs] But throughout my life, I’ve been very lucky to find people who have helped me build my confidence: Robert Mapplethorpe, Sam Shepard, and my editor and my lawyer — both women who encourage and even protect me. And so, I accept the good graces and love and belief of other people, without isolating myself. I also believe that if you perceive and know something as a calling, however fragile or strong it is, you’re pretty much obliged, like Jonah or anyone who’s been given a task, you have to do it. You can’t deny your calling, like Andrei Rublev trying to run away from his calling as an artist. We have to reconcile our calling with our work. It’s a privilege to be called.

END